Disclosures That Assistants Misused Their Authority

The unfolding of the Watergate scandal is subjecting not just President Nixon and some of his former top aides to intense public scrutiny and questioning. It can be said that the presidency itself is very much on trial. As portrayed in the press and congressional hearings, the existing White House staff system made it possible for presidential assistants to misuse power of almost unlimited scope in Nixon's name without audit or accountability. Moreover, there is the contention—raised by the President himself in his defense—that the system left him isolated from events he should have been informed about.

“For non-Americans,” the British philosopher and historian Arnold Toynbee wrote recently, “the strangest and most questionable feature of the government of the United States is the President's political family.…The President, after his election, appoints a band of personal aides and advisers.…The electorate has no say in this. Yet some of the President's personal minions have greater power de facto than any officer of the United States government who has been appointed by constitutionally established procedures.”

On Inauguration Day 1973, before the Watergate scandal had decimated the top echelon of the Nixon staff, Carroll Kilpatrick of The Washington Post wrote that “Nixon men are clearly and emphatically in charge, everywhere in the executive agencies. They can no longer blame ‘wasteful, musclebound government’ on old-line bureaucrats. The President and his loyal supporters have complete power—everywhere but in Congress—and they intend to operate independently of the Congress to the maximum degree possible.” Such control might have continued had it not been for the disclosures of White House involvement in political espionage and fund-raising with disregard for law to “fix” the 1972 presidential election—series of events that collectively have assumed the name Watergate.Once the story broke, Newsweek magazine commented on May 7, “an administration built around top-down rule from the White House was suddenly adrift.”